Lauren Admire:I agree, the sword story was a bit of a stretch. But, come on, SWORDS! I had to make it work in any way possible.

Indeed, a bit out of the blue, but you're right! There's a guy out there making swords out of bones! Someone has to talk about it!

Anyway, I love your writing style, and I'm such a geek for such science articles. How often will these get released?Also, ANOTHER column! The Escapist has so many columns now that I just spend more time reading the Escapist than all my other RSS feeds combined. I love it.

CERN is a gigantic facility built on the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva that hosts a Large Hadron Collider, a machine that basically throws tiny particles at each other at incredibly high speeds. When the particles collide, there's just the tiniest chance that a black hole could be created. The conversation between us and the researchers at CERN went thusly:PETTY HUMANS: BLACK HOLES ARE BAD AND MAYBE WE SHOULDN'T BRING ABOUT THE APOCALYPSE IN THE NAME OF SCIENCE.CERN: NO WAI! YOU GUYZ R DUM LOL THE BLACK HOLE WUD BE SO SMALL IT WUD COLLAPSE IN ON ITSELF MROW.Well, apparently you can't have too many black hole-creating machines.

No, actually the conversation's more along the lines of:

PEOPLE WHO DIDN'T LISTEN IN SCHOOL: "Black holes are bad and maybe we shouldn't bring about the apocalypse in the name of science."PEOPLE WHO DID THE RESEARCH AND KNOW WHAT THEY'RE TALKING ABOUT: "Yeah... it doesn't work that way. Look, actual calculations."

The point is that black holes aren't magic vacuum cleaners; their gravity is entirely dependent on their mass, and a black hole resulting from the collision of two protons has the mass of two protons. A black hole the mass of the earth - were such a thing possible - would have an identical gravity field to Earth, and even that wouldn't work.

The theory is quite complicated, but the bottom line is this: if the Daily Mail or Fox News are panicking about it, it's fairly safe to ignore it.

Lauren Admire:I agree, the sword story was a bit of a stretch. But, come on, SWORDS! I had to make it work in any way possible.

And I'm glad you did, that article was awesome, they were all good, but I now want my body to be used in the making of a fine sword when I die. And then that sword will be kept in the family for generations to come. Better than wasting valuable grave space.

And I thought you were gonna talk about swords made of bones. I was perplexed. Though not all that heavy on the science, come to think of it. More a reference to what science is doing. And I thought there were other ways to activate the cones in your eyes that already existed? Not well enough to process light, but enough to percieve distinct dimensions?